Hi all,
My name is Ann Husaini and I'm a freelance editor and post-production manager for documentary based in New York. I worked on a couple of great docs in years past that had good festival lives and were both selected for Whitney Biennials, ALMA and CARNIVAL ROOTS. One was about the healing of a mother-daughter relationship that had been scarred by mental illness and sexual abuse, and the other about Carnival in Trinidad. (Let me also mention that Meg Reticker, who is awesome, finished CARNIVAL when I went off to film school.) I went to Columbia for an MFA in film, directed many narrative shorts, and I've done a lot of reality tv in the past to pay for that lovely education! Right now I'm working on a couple of probono music doc projects. One's cutting a fundraising trailer about amazing jazz musician Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and the other's a co-editing a doc about 80's band/conceptual artists Devo. In the future I'd love to do human-rights oriented doc work too, and to teach teens and young adults about filmmaking. So if people need help with either, do feel free to approach me. I'm really looking forward to meeting the community on this site and I'll definitely look out on the board for ways I can help others. I hope to enjoy being a part of things here for many years to come!

I am in the midst of writing a business plan for investors and a international sales agent, just having finished the first draft of a budget for my film project, "TV MAN: THE SEARCH FOR THE LAST INDEPENDENT DEALER." The sample plans I've come across are either geared towards the non-profit sector or, if profit focused, appear to have more information than I believe is necessary for my project. Has anyone come across a good for-profit documentary business plan?

Listen to Robert. I asked a similar question 3 years ago. He gave a similar answer. I chose to ignore him. I have been kicking myself ever since. Anyone who gives you money should be looking for a tax deduction, because a profit will probably never come.

In the business plan draft I'm working on I've also included a fiscal sponsor fee in the budget and refer to it in the plan to allow the film's supporters to either make tax deductible donations or investments. I will have the final draft of the plan reviewed by experienced advisers, but feedback from this blog's readers will be helpful. Has anyone else used a similar hybrid plan to raise funds and, if so, what were the results?

hello all,
my name is jd and i am an american living in budapest hungary – i recently bought a canon legria/vixia hfs100 to make mini-documentaries or a political nature. You can see my progress in learning the little camera at http://vimeo.com/redjade

there are many many ideas i have for such mini-docus, but step by step i will get there :-)

Just did a show of original music bookended by a Gesualdo piece and a Rahsaan Roland Kirk tune in South Pasadena. Have done a bit of soundtrack music for a couple of documentaries and I really enjoyed it. Someone told me to check this site out so here I is.

I am a 'creative' from India with a quest for learning and acquiring knowledge about creative expression and zeal to contribute to the art of STORY.TELLING, by utilizing my skills and expertise to the fullest.

I'm a passionately social artist and documentary filmmaker that believes the best way to make a difference is to go out of our "established" ways of seeing and experiencing the world. I agree with Wade Davis that story telling and content that offer broader perspectives can create a difference. History has not been written, we make history with the choices and the stories we choose to tell. I'm the product of TED and Herzog, to me, if you have lived the world in a way, you would try to try to tell our story. I worked for TV and entertainment for more than 10 years, and I'm refusing my self to continue to produce garbage and meaningless programming.

Greetings from Helsinki, I'm a California-born photographer based in Helsinki. Tomorrow I'll begin a 3-country journey that will land me at The Lemesos International Documentary Film Festival in Cyprus. There, a project I'm producing based in New York, entitled THE MUSIC NEVER DIES

has been chosen to be a part of Docs Talk Cyprus, a 2-day pitch forum held within the festival. I'm three planes away, but am definitely looking forward to the project getting to take some meetings – we're now pulling for a co-production as we are ~40% funded with a budget of ~$250k.

A little about me:
I’ve been making documentaries in Los Angeles for the last 13 years – mainly films about a dying breed of old Hollywood art directors and cinematographers who I find inspiring as people as well as artists.
Some of my credits include, “Something’s Gonna Live,” which world premiered at the 2009 AFI FEST and is a follow-up to my first documentary, “The Man on Lincoln’s Nose" (2001 Oscar-nominated, Short Subject). Currently, I’m in post-production on a new film that will complete the trilogy of docs on old-Hollywood filmmakers.
Ross McElwee and Abbas Kiarostami are some of my cinema heroes. One of my favorite quotes from Kiarostami is something along the lines of: “Try to make your documentary like a fiction film, and your fiction film like a documentary."
Thanks to everyone who helps maintain this wonderful website. I look forward to meeting new folks on The D-Word!

Hi Doug,
Thanks for the update, albeit not very good news for us Ross McElwee fans. Are you at liberty to explain what the complications are holding up the film?
I posted in the Hidden Section a synopsis I found on Fandango – looks really interesting!

Documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee, who has cast his quizzical eye on such phenomena as the Civil War, his problems with women and the American news media, now explores the high stakes of life in South America in the movie In Paraguay. McElwee and his wife Marilyn McElwee decided to adopt a child, and made arrangements to become new parents of a baby girl living in Paraguay. When the McElwees flew to Paraguay to meet the child and bring her home, they were struck by the extreme poverty around them, the bureaucracy that dogged them at every stage of the adoption process, and the corruption and oppression that dominates Paraguay's politics. While Ross initially intended to focus on the process of adopting his new daughter, before long his film became a study of a culture whose flaws are all but impossible for him to comprehend, while he also tries to record a bit of his daughter's heritage for her to look to in the future. In Paraguay was an official selection at the 2008 Venice Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

I wish I could but I told Ross I'd keep it to myself. But we're getting a bit off topic here, this is basically for intros and greetings. We can continue any discussion of Ross, In Paraguay and the unique challenges of personal docs in the Documentary Film topic.

Hello everyone, I'm Indrani Kopal, a documentary filmmaker from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. And, I also work as a full time video journalist with Malaysiakini.com, an online news agency here in KL.

I just returned from Washington DC after being part of the 2010 International Emerging Documentary Filmmakers Fellowship program by The Documentary Center, at the George Washington University. I was really privileged to meet many experienced filmmakers during the 6-weeks program. And I really enjoyed SILVERDOC Festival.

indranikopal.blogspot.com/ is my blog. And, D-word site was a big buzz among many filmmakers I came across in US, so here I am :)